Her legs stiffened in one last convulsion, then she lay still.
Watching, Dirk shuddered in sympathy and then leaned forward to vent
his nausea in the grass. It came up sour and scalding hot. He wiped
it from his mouth with the palm of his hand, then he began to walk.
Without direction, blindly, from the field towards the escarpment.
Over in his mind, keeping pace with his legs like the refrain of a
marching song: He doesn't want me. He doesn't want me.
And then savagely: f hope he dies. Please let him die.
I
'Please let him die.' Anna Courtney said it softly, so that Garry
standing below her seat in the buggy did not hear her. He stood with
his shoulders hunched, and his head thrust forward in thought, hands
hanging at his sides slowly folding and unfolding, then he raised one
of them and squeezed the fingers into his closed eyelids.
'I'm going to him,' he said. 'God help me, but I'm going to him.
' 'No! I forbid it. Leave him-let him suffer as I suffered.'
Slowly, bewildered, Garry shook his head.
'I must. It's too long, too much. I must. Pray God it's not too
late.
'Let him die.' Then suddenly it snapped in her head, broke under the
weight of the hatred so long sustained.
She rose screaming in her seat. 'Die! Damn you. Die!' And Garry
uncovered his eyes, and looked at her in alarm.
'Compose yourself, my dear!'
'Die! Die!' Her face was blotched with flaming spots of red, and her
voice squawked as though she were being strangled.
Garry scrambled up beside her and flung his arms around her
Protectively.
'Get away from me. Don't touch me.' She screamed at him; fighting
from his embrace. 'Because of you I lost him. He was so big, so
strong. He was mine-and because .
'Anna, Anna. Please don't.' He tried to soothe her raving.
'Please stop it, my dear.'
'You, you crawling, crippled thing. Because of you.' And suddenly it
had to come out, like pus from a canker. 'But I paid you back. I took
him from you also-and now he's dead. You'll never have him. ' She
laughed, gloating, demented.
'Anna. Stop it.'
'That night-do you remember that night. Will you or he ever forget it?
I wanted him, I wanted him big like a bull on top of me, I wanted him
rutting deep like it was before-I begged him. I pleaded-but because of
you. Because of his crippled little weakling brother.
Christ, I hated him! ' She laughed again, a shriek of pain and
hatred.
'I tore my clothing and bit into my own lips, as I had wanted him to
do. When you came-I wanted you to ... but you, I had forgotten you
were only half a man!
I wanted you to kill him-kill him! Pale, so that the sweat on his face
shone like water on white marble, Garry pulled away from her with
loathing.
